Google To Add New Functionality To Circles With Latest Acquisition

Google’s relentless march to the top of the social media mountain just got another boost with the announcement that they’ve acquired the start-up called Fridge.

What is Fridge? Well, before Google came up with the idea of making it easier to segment your friends, Fridge had pioneered that functionality. The start-up created a social network that made it easy for you to organize your friends into groups, plan events and share photos. They got so good at it that they grew to a user base of 40,000.

With the acquisition, Google is clearly showing its desire to make Circles one of the cornerstones of Google+ and reports are that the Fridge team will hit the ground running as they work to make Circles better. At present, the “groups” functionality is lacking in Google+ so the expertise Fridge brings to the table will be might handy. Throw in “event planning” functionality and Google+ will be pretty much Facebook on steroids.

The rumors are flying that Google+ goes live to the public on the 31st July 2011, and whilst that may or may not be the case, it is clear Google wants the platform to be robust enough to live up to the hype. Expect more acquisitions to be announced since Google+ is not quite the juggernaut that Google is looking to build.

Watch the video below to see the really cool benefits of Google+ Circles.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8

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Google Adds Brand New Button To Circles Toolbar & Puts Circle-Building On Steroids

Google+ is now sitting at an estimated 18 million users, but even with such phenomenal growth, Google is not satisfied. Only complete world domination will do it seems, and so in an effort to take over the world, a new button has been added to the Circles toolbar.

This magical button makes adding people to your circles super easy—and super-fast. Now with just a few clicks of your mouse, you upload entire address books. Those few hundred or so people you have stored in Outlook or Thunderbird just became useful. This new button adds additional oomph to the process of building circles, since the ability to upload from Hotmail and Yahoo are already present.

The upload feature from an address book is also very intuitive, allowing you to drag and drop friends into the circles you desire. It’ll even filter those contacts already added into circles from other sources such as Hotmail.

Only a button that lets you upload contacts from Facebook stands between Google+ and total world social media domination. And with Facebook very anxious of the growth of Google+, I don’t expect to see such a button—ever! Facebook has so far thwarted all efforts to let users export their contacts, and I expect that policy to remain extant.

Facebook effort aside though, we can expect Google+ to grow an even greater rate with this new feature.

Watch the video below to see more on the address book uploader.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxU0bEOGBBU

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